How time flies….. A brief resume of the last month!

Events happen and I promise myself to get them up online within minutes, then hours, then days which turn into weeks ……..

The Searson’s Wine Tasting at the Four Seasons Hotel in Ballsbridge, Dublin was a great event. Fantastic wines and fine food. For some reason the half a dozen food stalls were located in the area where the finest and rarest wines were being tasted, nothing but the best!

We had our first public tasting of our Gravadlax; the reaction was very positive so it is now available from us! The packaging has now been designed and will be printed before long. Keep watching this space…..

A quick aside – I drove to Dublin from West Cork, leaving here at 5.45 am. I reached the outskirts of Dublin, just pass the new Avoca shop in Rathcoole at 8.00am. It took me 2 hours to get from there to Ballsbridge – and people do that every day of the week…..?

Before leaving Dublin I paid a quick visit to a couple of our outlets, Thomas’s of Foxrock, Thyme Out in Dalkey, Avoca in Rathcoole and Nolans Butchers in Kilcullen.

Found myself in the village of Tisbury, Wiltshire, UK two weekends ago bearing the tricolour (to encourage the home team at Dublin for that magnificent victory over the auld enemy!). There is a super deli there, Deliz, run by the suitably delightful Liz, and I was tasting our smoked salmon, smoked chicken and dry cured bacon – all of which went down very well. Simon Richardson of GS Foods was grilling the rashers and the aroma filled the shop.

If you are in the South and South West UK and want to find out who stocks our products, either contact me at [email protected] or Simon at [email protected] (Tel: 07887 577 047).

On Monday , March 5th, I was back in Dublin again having received an invitation from the Irish Food Writers Guild to join them for lunch at L’Ecrivain Restaurant!

Couldn’t refuse, could I! The journey would have been worth it just to viist Derry Clarke’s great restaurant, but to make it twice as worthwhile was that our Smoked Silver Eel was to receive one of the four awards given to food companies by the Guild for 2007.

It was a great honour to get the award, even more so as I had no idea how and why we were nominated (I do now!) .

Derry made a memorable Terrine of Smoked Eel, Horseradish, Cauliflower Cream and Beignet as the first course to a splendid meal; it was accompanied by a delicious Chenin Blanc from the Brown Brothers vineyard in Australia. The recipe will be on our Smoked Eel page shortly.

The other award winners this year were Bernadette Butler of the Good 4U Food and Drink Compan, Andrew McGuinness of Meadowsweet Apiaries and Ralph Hasslam of Mossfield Organic Cheese fame.

For nearly forty years Ummera has built up an enviable reputation for producing some of the finest smoked salmon available. We originally concentrated on smoking the Wild Atlantic Salmon which were caught by fishermen as the salmon returned from their feeding grounds in the North Atlantic. Since 2006, when it was obvious that over-fishing was having significant effects on wild salmon stocks, Ummera has been smoking Irish organically reared salmon.

Their natural flavour and texture, blended with our careful curing, and gentle smoking over smouldering oak fires ensure that you will enjoy the finest smoked salmon ...Learn more